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New High Tech $100 Bills Start To Circulate Today
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "New $100 bills made their debut today in the U.S. They include high tech features designed to make it easier for the public to authenticate but more difficult for counterfeiters to replicate. Those measures include a blue, 3-D security ribbon, as well as color-shifting ink that changes from copper to green when the note is tilted (PDF). That ink can be found on a large '100' on the back of the bill, on one of the '100's' on the front, and on a new image of an ink well that's also on the front. 'The $100 is the highest value denomination that we issue, and it circulates broadly around the world,' says Michael Lambert, assistant director for cash at the Federal Reserve Board. 'Therefore, we took the necessary time to develop advanced security features that are easy for the public to use in everyday transactions, but difficult for counterfeiters to replicate.' The bill was originally due to reach banks in 2011, but three years ago the Federal Reserve announced that a problem with the currency's new security measures was causing the bills to crease during printing, which left blank spaces on the bills. This led the Feds to shred more than 30 million of the bills in 2012. The image of Benjamin Franklin will be the same as on the current bill, but like all the other newly designed currencies, it will no longer be surrounded by an dark oval. Except for the $1 and $2 bill, all U.S. paper currency has been redesigned in the last 10 years to combat counterfeiting."
The new $100 bill looks similar to the euro bill. Who knows, pretty soon all of our currency will look the same and eventually become one currency, and we all know what that will bring...
It is the same, it's backed by nothing. The gold is gone, where's the gold? The silver is gone, where's the silver?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
are 2 dollar bills in circulation? just asking because I haven't seen any.
They are, ask for some at the bank.
And yet they can't do such basic things as, say, change the sizes of the notes so that vision impaired people can tell the difference between a one dollar and ten dollar bill just by checking its length. (Have a look at the Australian notes for an example: each note is seven millimeters longer than the preceding one by value.)
They'd also do well by dropping the one and two dollar bills, replacing them with coins; the currency has devalued so much, it's not worth keeping the low value notes as notes. You could also make a case for ditching the penny, to boot.
But hey, what would I know ...
So why would I bother trying to counterfeit the newer more difficult bills instead of just doing the older easier ones since they remain legal tender?
“The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit, Hollis, and by the same token the number one target of counterfeiters.”
If the government is supposed to be shut down, how could anyone release this money?
The federal reserve is not part of the government, it never was, it never will be.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
All your money is belong to East German Stasi
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Actually, most $100 bill counterfeiting is in the former USSR and adjacent countries.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...the United States still has the world's fugliest currency.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
The only way to make currency impossible to counterfeit is to not have fiat currency in the first place, which means the people would choose something real to be money, I am talking about gold, and you can't really counterfeit that.
Care to place a wager on that?
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
Is it me, or does it have a bluish tinge now that makes it easier to tell that it's a different denomination?
Most countries already use different colored bills to help distinguish one denomination from another (and to aid in quickly determining how much cash on hand you have by a quick glance). Only in the US do I have to manually count out every bill to make sure a $5 didn't sneak in with the $1s and so on.
Of course, perhaps it's time to go beyond linen/cotton/paper based bills and move to plastic (polymer) based ones...
Or even buy it by the sheet: http://www.moneyfactorystore.gov/uncutcurrency.aspx
soylentnews.org
There are something like 3 million of them in circulation, and new ones are still being printed periodically. But many people, like yourself, have never actually encountered one.
(I've heard anecdotes of people trying to spend one being accused of counterfeiting, because the cashier had never seen one and assumed that it was a fraud).
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
Hey, wonder why they didn't incorporate the accidental blank spaces as an additional security feature? You know, like old school game disks used to have certain sectors purposefully corrupted as a method of copy protection, so if you copied the game to a new disk and the computer didn't see the bad sectors where it expected to, it would know it was a copy...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
According to our friend Wikipedia, new ones have been printed as recently as last year...
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
They've been printed as recent as 2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_two-dollar_bill#1976.E2.80.93Present
The banks that don't have them in stock will almost always be willing to include a brick of $2 bills in their next currency order to the Fed if you agree to take all 1000 of them. It takes me about a year to go through a brick just using them for small cash purchases.
nonsense, counterfeiting gold is crime that goes to ancient times
What's gold and silver backed by? Oh yeah, that's right nothing but our imagination.
Money is like a strapless evening dress on a 70 year old: It's held up by the collective belief that anything is better than having to see it drop.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It was never backed by gold. It was always backed only by promises. There was not enough gold to pay back if every dollar was brought in for a gold payout.
Learn to love Alaska
Bills have (or used to have) intentional mistakes that a hand engraver was likely to fix subconsciously, including in some cases typos in microprint and tiny jagged (as if by accident) straight lines.
Nowadays bills are copied using high-speed high-precision laser scanners so I do not know if those artifacts are still used as security devices.
So we now make our money safe by implementing security means they had in their money for a decade now, because we know they don't have access to that kind of sophisticated technology. Uhhuh.
Makes about as much sense as anything coming out of capitol hill lately.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It will still be worth 100 USD. No doubt about that.
It might be worth 1 EUR, though. Well, technically it IS worth an EUR, but we prop that toy money up because we simply got too much of it ourselves.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, more like a TV on standby. You don't really get anything out of it, but it still sucks up juice.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
that's mostly because people go, "oooo, a crisp $2 bill! hardly ever see those!" and then they stash it somewhere at home
actulay not you can debase currency and at one time it was a crime treated as seriously as treason and had some very nasty death penalties.
2 dollar bills would actually be what I'd forge if I were to. Think about it, it's legal tender, it's an amount where most businesses won't start to make a fuss over and nobody really knows what they should look like.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So we now make our money safe by implementing security means they had in their money for a decade now, because we know they don't have access to that kind of sophisticated technology. Uhhuh.
Makes about as much sense as anything coming out of capitol hill lately.
Pretty much.
Next up, 2020, are one and two dollar coins.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The Fed doesn't print the money, they're just the central bank that issues the money, which isn't the same thing. The actual printing of the banknotes is done by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the coins are made by the United States Mint.
It's similar in Canada, where the Bank of Canada issues the money, the coins are made by the Royal Canadian Mint, and the banknotes are printed by a couple different private companies under contract. Interestingly, neither of those companies is Canadian-owned. One is American (R.R. Donnelley & Sons) and the other is German (Giesecke & Devrient).
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Darn, now that I can no longer counterfeit Ben Franklins with my printer, I'll have to go back to counterfeiting printer cartridges.
no, the Federal Funds Rate is currently 0.25% and for overnight loans. very short term so does not have the explosive inflationary effect you seem to imagine.
The 'Old Man' at the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas has all the silver. Smart man!
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Uh, because anyone making a set of counterfeit plates would just make sure his plates had the same blank spaces? The idea is to put in features that the counterfeiters couldn't easily copy...
(and FYI - it took me about 20 minutes to slap together a simple TSR to provide the proper "bad" sectors where required for those stupid disks. Turns out that was trivially easy to get around too...)
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
Which is kind of sad, because the back of the $2 bill has been pretty awesome since 1976.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I've heard of a handful of isolated cases of people counterfeiting the new polymer Canadian bills, but no stories about any that actually entered circulation.
In other words, the hopeful counterfeiters who've attempted this so far are only fooling people who can't be bothered to actually check for even the most basic security characteristics. The forgeries discovered were actually quite crude,and it's nothing less than laziness on the part of the recipients that led to it being passed off as genuine in the first place. One wonders if they could have been equally successful passing off monopoly money as genuine, simply if it were at least sized correctly (jokes about how Canada currency looks like monopoly money to some people aside).
The techniques used in the new Canadian bills have been in use in Australia for about 25 years now, and to date, by my understanding, the measures have defeated *every* attempt to pass off a fake bill as genuine under remotely close scrutiny.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The only stuff in the universe that cannot be counterfeited is energy.
I propose a new currency based on the kWh. Instead of slips of paper or plastic credit cards, people will use rechargeable batteries and actually transfer units of work between each other.
At first there will be extremely rapid inflation as people set up solar collectors and other such stuff, but eventually nearly every inch of the earth will be dedicated to collecting energy. Things like tax credits and welfare can be eliminated as every man, woman, and child will be able to collect or generate at least some energy (the government could give out stationary bikes that collect energy), which will act as a base negative tax rate.
With so much energy then available, what would our standard of living be?
Seriously, I'm waiting a patent troll to step up to the plate and sue cuz the new currency uses something the troll patented.
$100 bills are the most popular bill counterfeited in the world. however, $20 bills are the most popular bill counterfeited in the US.
the new design is going to piss off North Korea because they counterfeit US $100 bills like crazy: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2013/1008/New-100-bill-why-North-Korea-won-t-be-very-happy-video
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Encrypt the serial number into the features on both sides of the bill. That way at least the forgers have to copy multiple bills using multiple plates if they want a bunch of different serial numbers.
Nullius in verba
That's exactly what I do, I've got, like, 5 of them.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
That's the one. Apparently the Secret Service has been giving them grief for dying the bills red.
Are you sure about that? Seems like there is a certain organization in the USA with almost no oversight that prints tons of $100 bills. Inflation is a measure of how much "counterfeiting" they have done. Money should have constant value, they should print to try and make that happen.
The Bank of Canada is wholly Canadian owned. Legally, it is a crown corporation, belonging to the federal government. Ultimately, the Bank of Canada is owned by the people of Canada.
R.R. Donnelly runs the Canadian Bank Note Company, which prints bank notes for Canada, but this has always been a private company (before 1920, it was a subdivision of the American Bank Note Company in New York). The Canadian Bank Note Company is not to be confused with the Royal Canadian Mint, which is another crown corporation, and is also wholly owned by the Government of Canada. CBN also prints passports, driver's licences, and assorted other documents that are government-issued.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What's gold and silver backed by? Oh yeah, that's right nothing but our imagination.
So long as chicks will put out for shiny things, men will value gold and silver.
Only difference is, European paper money quality has been so much better for a long time, that the largest notes are about 5...10x higher in denomination, even before the Euro. The largest one is 500EUR ~ 679USD.
US paper money sucked badly for a far longer time than the stuff used by the rest of the world. Well, better (very) late than never. You may consider $200 and $500 bills next. Well, maybe in 20 or 30 years when your tech has caught up.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It was never backed by gold.
But it was once backed by SILVER, an it said so right on the face of Silver Certificates, which you could turn in for actual silver. Allegedly.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Indeed. Currently the rest of the world is very much afraid what would happen when the USD would be valuated at what it is actually worth (hint: Greece may or may not be in better economic shape than the US, it is a close thing). Also China has a lot of USD they do not want to see crash. But as soon as this irrational fear vanishes, anything can happen. And the traditional way out for low-performing countries (tourism) is not open to the US unless the TSA is killed for good.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The gold is gone, where's the gold?
And the gold was backed by...?
It's awesomely shiny, and it has a small number of specialty scientific and industrial uses, but gold as gold isn't all that intrinsically valuable as a mineral; it's just rather rare and something that a number of societies historically used as one convenient medium of exchange.
You can't eat it. You can't drink it. You can't shoot someone with it. You can't get other people to do stuff in exchange for it unless there is a stable enough society that the recipients anticipate being able to trade it in turn.
Its market value is significantly more variable and volatile than that of the major fiat currencies. The price of gold backed with pure gold isn't stable or reliable from year to year, I can't imagine why we would expect a currency backed with it to be magically better.
~Idarubicin
He didn't specify the gender of the 70-year old. Any misogyny here is your own.
It was never backed by gold.
But it was once backed by SILVER, an it said so right on the face of Silver Certificates, which you could turn in for actual silver. Allegedly.
You can still turn your bills in for gold, silver, zinc, or BTC. You just have to trade it with someone besides the government.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
"Actually, most $100 bill counterfeiting is in the former USSR and adjacent countries."
Since the old notes will keep their value forever, they can still print those old ones and hence this anti-counterfeiting measure is worthless.
Yes, I am sure about that. Former USSR nations tend to not trust virtual currency, so they use US paper bills - mostly $1000 and $100 bills.
Up to 50 percent of all "US currency" in those countries is counterfeit.
Which is why they're replacing those bills. Most Americans never - ever - use $100 or $1000 bills. Generally, we use $20 and $50 and anything bigger we do by credit card or debit card or wire.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
At some point we'll do what France and the UK did and phase out the old bills. Probably starting outside of the US itself.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Sure you can, just use a particle accelerator. Knocking one nucleon off of Hg-198 would do the trick, I believe. It's already been done, it's just too costly to bother with at this point. We'll be synthesizing the stuff in quantity before the end of the century, assuming we don't have a big nuclear war or other civilization-ending calamity before then.
It was backed by the same promises as a fiat currency. Show up at Fort Knocks with a truckload of silver certificates, and you are at the mercy of the government for the conversion. It was always "faith-only", there was just some theoretical link between it and some commodity. In invasion, they'd be canceled. There was also not enough metal to back them all. So the non-fiat currency was still fiat, just revisioned to the Golden Age by the modern gold bugs.
Learn to love Alaska
"It has had value since humans placed value on things."
Correction: it has been GIVEN value since humans placed value on things. You can't eat gold, right? you can't shelter with gold, right?
Now, think of it. Gold has value because people gave it value. This means that other things can have value as long as people gives value to them. Pretty papers with a portrait of a famous dead guy, for instance.
No, you could go to any Federally Charted bank and get Silver Dollars (which at that time were in fact silver).
You didn't need a truckload, you could do it bill by bill. Only after 1968 did they abrogate the promise
of silver. This was preceded by a years notice, and was sort of a big deal at the time.
I distinctly remember many people gathering silver certificates and turning them in for silver granules.
This they thought was a hedge against inflation. Shortly after 1968, the price of silver crashed, and many sold at a loss.
By 78, silver had doubled from its 68 price, and by 88, it had risen ten fold.
It was only the bills marked Hawaii and North Africa that cold be canceled upon invasion.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
And the gold was backed by...?
"Backed" is the wrong word, but the factor that has made gold a trustworthy currency for millenia, one people are eager to receive and reluctant to part with, is scarcity.
In terms of "backing", Federal Reserve notes and gold are on the same footing. Neither is backed by anything else. The difference is that there is no practical limit to the number of FRNs in circulation, which means that if the Federal Reserve so chooses your currency could have half the purchasing power tomorrow that it has today. Admittedly that is very unlikely, but no one has that kind of influence over the price of gold, because it can't simply be created on demand.
A currency which is backed by something represents a liability against the issuer to provide a fixed amount of that something on demand in exchange for each unit of the currency. The United States used to have this form of paper currency; in going off the gold standard the U.S. government repudiated its very real debts as the currency's issuer.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
It has had value since humans placed value on things.
Ah, good, at least you understand where value comes from (and thus fundamentally agree with the person you were responding to), rather than believing in magical fairy tales like "intrinsic value" or such nonsense...
At least it has intrinsic value...
...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Iran has been circulating these new $100s since last week.
U.S. currency gets scrutinized much more overseas than it does here stateside. I was trying to exchange money in Indonesia a few years back and most places simply refused to accept any currency older than 1996. Even if the bill was new, if it had any sorts of tears or random pen marks on it, forget about it. Not going to be accepted. Once these new bills start circulating, I would imagine the older bills will get harder and harder to use until they are out right rejected. Just because they still legally have value doesn't mean anyone has to accept them when you're talking about outside the U.S.
Crazy gold bug,
Gold-backed currency does not mean that everyone carries around gold in their pocket. It's actually quite a bit harder to accurately value and validate than paper currency with various anti-counterfeiting properties. Let me repeat that, physical gold is easier to counterfeit for typical casual excahanges than modern cash.
So in the realm of reality where cash has not been physical gold in living memory, nor will it be, gold-backed currency could only exist in a similar form as our current currency. And it would be subject to exactly the same forms of counterfeiting.
Just because the value of the valid currency would be, in your mind, ideologically pure, doesn't mean people can't fake it.
So now we see that your reasoning is entirely nonsense, which is always the case when gold bugs speak.
-josh
Encrypt the serial number into the features on both sides of the bill. That way at least the forgers have to copy multiple bills using multiple plates if they want a bunch of different serial numbers.
So how is the *government* going to print these things, without having a different set of plates for every serial number?
FYI - Bills are typicallly printed in sheets, without the serial numbers, and the serial numbers are added in a later printing step.
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
Apparently, almost a year ago to the day, a "large amount" were stolen from a Philly airport. I couldn't find a follow-up (might be what I used for initial sources), but am I now to believe these theives can finally spend their cash? Or was the design tweaked since then? I suppose if it was, it would benefit the FBI investigation to not have that stated.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
I miss Monticello, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-$2-LT-1928-Fr.1501.jpg
[UID-HeinzIntel]
The Federal Funds Rate is at 0.08% Of course the target rate is zero to .25 but since corporate stocks and profits are at all time highs it is hard to turn off the spigot so I imagine that is why the rate is near the lower bounds. The federal reserve corporation has conjured up Four trillion dollars in the last five years with no end in sight. Please forgive me, to the novice like myself they would appear to be producing quite a bit of money out of thin air. I am sure if I were a Wall Street investment banker the subtleties of monetary policy would be much clearer to me.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
I can tell you right now that the bird droppings can have far more value than gold.
Situation: The "system" has collapsed. Its hard to get anything - its simply not there. You have some land, and you can grow stuff there... but the soil is poor...
If I were on the Titanic when it was going down, you can bet your bottom dollar that the old styrofoam cooler box with the broken lid is more valuable to me than a satchel full of gold coin.
The only reason gold was considered of value is because it represented the work it took to mine it; it could not be simply signed into existence like today's dollar.
I took a big hit on this personally about six years ago, as everything I knew indicated petroleum and rights to it represented a far more stable store of wealth than, say, an American Dollar, which can be printed up in unlimited quantities. I considered the petroleum valuable because of the work it could do, not for what it looked like or what other people valued it as... remember milk pogs?
Yet I watched people sell off their petroleum stocks en masse in a "flight to safety", US Treasuries. Selling off their ownership of petrochemical industry for pieces of paper with a dead president on it. I bought as much oil stuff as I could, and by golly I am hanging onto it.
We may be basking in fracking now, but I know from personal experience how fast a fart flies. I am an old man, and old men have quite a repertoire of experiences with how fast gas passes.
It amazes me that diamonds have any worth at all to speak of. They can be made in a lab. They make fine abrasives, and have some interesting thermal and optical properties, but as a store of wealth? Again, compare to milk pogs. If we want some, just make some. It will require energy though, and that's why I thought energy investments would be the most critical thing in our world today. Yes, I read the comments on the Slashdot story, and still am of extremely mixed emotions on it. A helluva lot of cognitive dissonance going on in me. Enough to drive me crazy.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
And it's a bill that hardly ever gets used so people pay a great deal of attention to them when they see them. Whether or not people are intimately familiar with them, I don't think drawing a lot of eyes to your counterfeit transactions is very smart idea.
Especially when even genuine $2 bills can get you in trouble.
Kinda like when someone managed to pass a $200 bill (yes, $200) with GWB on the front and oil derricks on the back at a Dairy Queen.
During recorded history, actually. It was the discovery of touchstone which made it practical.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Conveniently, it can be freely converted to bitcoin. Unfortunately, it can't be converted back.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
if the Federal Reserve so chooses your currency could have half the purchasing power tomorrow that it has today. Admittedly that is very unlikely, but no one has that kind of influence over the price of gold, because it can't simply be created on demand.
This, right here, is the usual logical error that gold bugs typically make. While the physical amount of gold in existence can't readily be changed (we'll neglect the small amount of 'new' gold added to the economy through mining), the supply of gold - reserves available for sale - and the overall demand for gold are very much vulnerable to both general volatility and deliberate manipulation. Changes in supply and demand in turn significantly shift the perceived value of gold, leading to swings in its market price and in its effective purchasing power.
This has been illustrated quite graphically over the last few years. Fifteen years ago, gold was trading below $300 US per ounce. Ten years ago, it was pushing $400. Five years ago, it was around $900. A year ago, it was nudging $1800. Now it has slid back down to $1300, and shows no sign of slowing its decline. There was a similar spike around 1980. There wasn't a sudden reduction in the amount of gold in the world over the last decade or so, but for some reason the price of an ounce increased six-fold (before plummeting again). Either U.S. dollars really did lose five-sixths of their value between 1998 and 2012 - a conclusion not supported by their ability to buy pretty much any good, commodity, or foreign currency - or the 'intrinsic' value of gold generally accounts for only a relatively small portion of its market price, and the majority of its 'value' is just as imaginary as that of any fiat currency.
A currency which is backed by something represents a liability against the issuer to provide a fixed amount of that something on demand in exchange for each unit of the currency. The United States used to have this form of paper currency; in going off the gold standard the U.S. government repudiated its very real debts as the currency's issuer.
The price of gold under the various iterations of the gold standard was stable not because of gold's intrinsic value, but because the currency (or currencies) pegged to it had a perceived stable value. In a very real and practical sense, the strength of the U.S. dollar was backing the price of gold for much of the 20th century, and not the other way around.
~Idarubicin
Actually, I had forgotten the Eisenhower dollar. It too never saw much actual circulation.
And lacking the nice long life of polymer bank notes..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_banknote
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The difference is scarcity.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
GO to the horse track. $2 bets are common, so they use $2 bills for change.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
I'm sorry but gold has had multiple uses throughout history, from sutures (first used by the Romans IIRC) to computer chips. Gold and silver isn't just given value because "hurr..looks purty" because if that were the case there are plenty of metals that look purity but they aren't valued like gold and silver, the reason why is obvious and that is because both gold and silver are easy to work and have multiple applications.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The claim is that there were more paper dollars then there was actual silver. If the government issues (numbers made up) $10 million in silver certificates and only has $5 million in bullion you can not exchange it all for silver. The gamble is that half the people won't actually try to exchange their paper for silver and it is a pretty good gamble.
I heard an interview with someone who figured even now that there is about 7 times the amount of paper gold as real gold. Whether true or not I don't know but it is easy to believe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Speaking of old... I'm fairly sure if somebody pulled a Reagan era $100 note from a matress somewhere, it's still spendable. Anti-counterfeit measures are only good as the oldest version of currency still being accepted.
Here in Canada most stores won't take old large ($50-$100) bills so you have to take them to a bank. The bank tellers usually have enough experience to spot most counterfeits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You can't shoot someone with it.
Wouldn't gold make wonderful bullets? Denser then lead, it should pack quite a punch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
And it's not like they don't have any cash on hand with which to pay their employees ;)
Paranoia has shrunk the size of the bills over the years. Someone might do something illegal with that $1000 or $10000 bill.
There still are a few $10000 bills around, a Vegas casino IIRC used to exhibit 100 of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That may well be true. With regards to gold, it never was used to back paper, but mostly to manage international accounts, and usually with countries which had currency even more leveraged than the US currency.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
There have been quite a lot of countries that actually had a gold (or other similar valuable metals, most notably silver, that could easily be exchanged for gold) storage that would back every single paper money bill in rotation. It called the "gold standard" and money issued when this was in effect could always be exchanged for a predetermined amount of gold, noted on the bills. This was especially true in Europe in the era just after Napoleon, since people distrusted "paper money" after the French government refused to exchange the money Napoleon introduced when he conquered their countries and took all their gold and silver. In the USA, history went another way and there have only been short periods when the government had a gold or silver standard. Gold standards have existed far into the 20th century and only when people trusted their government enough (or when they got greedy enough) governments have been abandoning this.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I go down to the bank every few months and get a couple hundred dollars of them in rolls. Carrying 4 or 5 of them around in your pocket is no big deal and my wallet is thinner without the $1 bills in it. Caution: If you get rolls you're likely to get the occasional Susan B. Anthony dollar too which is silver with a fluted edge, the ones that are easy to mistake for a quarter.
I thought that there was paper gold as well. There was real gold in the form of Eagles which raises another problem with a metallic based currency. What is the exchange rate between silver and gold? Are those 10 silver dollars equal to that gold $10 piece? Is it the same value in other markets? Countries have been screwed when all their gold or silver left the country due to being worth more somewhere else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
and doesnt sound like any of those security measures is any new ... heck, even the not-even-5€ lunch vouchers I get at work have color-shifting ink, watermarking and a "3d" surface ...
There's plenty of stuff that's rare that nobody wants.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"I'm sorry but gold has had multiple uses throughout history, from sutures (first used by the Romans IIRC) to computer chips."
Yeah, and it was used to store and represent wealth because, you know, it's good to have some ounces of it in case you have to practice a suture. C'mon, man, C'mon.
I'll tell you exactly why it was chosen:
* First and foremost because humans are capable of abstraction and so, we can cognitate in terms of "look, this is gold, but let's pretend it is not gold but wealth". In other words, it has value because there is a common understandment that we'll give value to it.
* It's scarce enough that it takes considerable work to take it out of land, so it's no danger of a repent market flood, you want some stability on its meaning.
* It's soft and malleable, so you can fractionalize it with ease.
* It's dense, so you can agree to represent a good piece of wealth in low volume: you don't want to trade a day's worth of effort for the volume of a house.
* It's stable, so you can use it to store wealth. You don't want your wealth to vanish in short term all by itself.
* Hurr... looks purty so, why not?
You see, all its properties comes from an abstractions and its ability to sustain the meaning of that abstraction. And that's why, in the end, fiat money works exactly the same, because from the begining, it was a matter of puting value onto something, not that this something had a value on itself.
yes. by living in or traveling in the US you make an implicit agreement to accept the currency of the land. You can move your business elsewhere if you dont trust the dollar. It would require a lot of effort, but thats your problem if you view it as "backed by nothing". Using this currency also comes with rights of the land, so (independent of whether you want it or not) you get the protections and regulations that come along with it. This is a part of participating in a society where people are not altruistic and we require laws and order, whether or not you agree with all the laws and regulations as they are.
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
Rebuttal:
Gold and silver leaf can be eaten, but I would not make it part of a dietary plan in large quantities.
The purpose of precious metals backing a currency keeps the currency from being overprinted, no precious metal, no federal note. Granted, the whole federal reserve note thing is completely bogus, instigated by theives, liars and murderers (due to the wars they insist upon having) I believe money is nothing more than a control mechanism used by the power elite. Is a cashless society even possible ala Star Trek? Who would benefit? Who would be deprived? Would there be a necessity for mandatory healthcare? What of education? Being able to pursue advanced degrees without becoming an indentured servant forever is sensible. Precious metals as well as diamonds are manipulated markets. If all the precious metals and gemstones were dumped on the market, they would literally be worthless(?) Society, like a melting pot is a mixture of many ideas and beliefs, however there is a scum that rises to the top, and that scum must be removed to keep the purity of the whole. This is not to be misconstrued with alloys, the introduction of small amounts of diverse substances that create vastly superior products.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
It is the same, it's backed by nothing. The gold is gone, where's the gold? The silver is gone, where's the silver?
Where'd the gold go?
(I don't know!)
Where'd the silver go?
(I don't know!)
Bitch, where the mothaf**kin' gold at?
(I don't know!)
Motherf**k!
Yeah, but the issuing government is gone. Where's the issuing government?
Right now, Zimbabwe has a more functional government than the issuing government of the $100 bill.
I have a goldbug friend that pays a premium for his "insured" bar somewhere in Europe. He claims he can visit his gold anytime. But all he has is a piece of paper that says they should give him gold. If something bad enough happens that we abandon all currency and only trade metal, what are the chances that he'll be able to withdraw his supposed gold? What proof does he have that they haven't sold that one bar 100 times?
None. Same as all the other "backed" currency. It'd backed by faith alone.
Learn to love Alaska
I feel sorry for North Korea - what are they going to do for hard currency now, unless can catch up with this?
Though saying that, the $100 is essentially an Asian currency as that's mostly where it circulates. Not a bad thing for the US - they get $100 for printing each one, the bills disappear overseas forever and so never contribute to US inflation.
I don't really see the "dense" argument. If it were less dense, it wouldn't take the volume of a house to represent a day's worth of effort. It would take the same volume, which would have less mass (unless you somehow link it to your "scarcity" point).
I agree with all the others. Except I don't think understandment or cognitate are words.
.. more long-lived, but they're also quite impractical in everyday use.
Look, for example, to the EU, which has â1/â2 coins and not notes, and ask the people how they like 'em. (Hint: they're nearly-universally loathed.)
It's probably what will happen in the future, but it's quite problematic as is. There is a positive feedback loop: once you have more money (energy) you can buy more land and set up more solar panels, and exploit more resources. This feedback loop already exists because one can rent out land and houses, but it will be much greater when it can be used to directly generate money. The good part is that there is a built in inflation: it is difficult to store energy for a long time. This will just mean that land and other properties will be the preferred way to store money, and that's pretty much already the case
Most countries run a new series in parallel with the old one and when the % of old series drops to some point they set a date when it ceases to be legal tender (i.e. shops are not obliged to accept it). After that time someone has to exchange the old notes for new notes in some central bank office where presumably they're very good at spotting fakes. It seems odd that the US wouldn't protect its money in the same way.
That would only work if we had efficient storage methods to keep the energy from degrading practically at all.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
It was only the bills marked Hawaii and North Africa that cold be canceled upon invasion.
Inflation? What?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
So, the obvious solution is to counterfeit $1 bills.
Let's see if I can educate the Slashdot crowd today, be sure to Google my headline "Mr. 880".
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Yes it does. IIRC about 2% of gold goes into these useful things. The rest goes into stockpiles or jewelry (which for many people is a stockpile.)
In fact we could shut down all gold mines today and use our stockpile of gold for the next thousand years. So in that sense gold is actually more plentiful then copper or iron.
So I don't think the value of gold is being driven on how useful it is in manufacturing. It is valuable because people deem it is valuable - much like fiat money. (but I will grant that fiat money is easier to debase then gold.)
I am talking about gold, and you can't really counterfeit that.
You mite want to look up the history of paper currency.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
They've been printed as recent as 2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_two-dollar_bill#1976.E2.80.93Present
Thanks. I guess I was part of the majority who thought they were no longer minted. I must say, though, that the newest $2 bill I've seen was from 1976.
Sorry to hear you're an old man with tons of oil stocks. The natural gas industry is going to continue to grow for decades, and you may never realize value recovery/growth from oil before you take that long dirt nap.
Disclaimer: I'm not thrilled about the breackneck expansion of U.S. natural gas exploitation.
While the physical amount of gold in existence can't readily be changed..., the supply of gold - reserves available for sale - and the overall demand for gold are very much vulnerable to both general volatility and deliberate manipulation.
No argument there, but the supply of FRNs is far more vulnerable. Deliberate manipulation of the gold supply is limited by the amount of reserves available, and in order to use those reserves for manipulation they have to be dumped on the market well below their current price, which both reduces the scope for future manipulation and costs the entity doing the manipulation dearly.
This has been illustrated quite graphically over the last few years. Fifteen years ago, gold was trading below $300 US per ounce. ... A year ago, it was nudging $1800. Now it has slid back down to $1300, and shows no sign of slowing its decline. There was a similar spike around 1980. ... the 'intrinsic' value of gold generally accounts for only a relatively small portion of its market price, and the majority of its 'value' is just as imaginary as that of any fiat currency.
This is typical "bubble" behavior, driven by demand for gold as a hedge against the dollar and an excess of cheap money resulting from the same Fed policies which lead people to seek a hedge in the first place. This sort of thing can happen to any commodity—even the dollar, were anyone inclined to consider the dollar a "safe" investment. Other memorable targets of bubbles in recent history include tech companies and housing. Notice I never said a word about "intrinsic value"; the price of gold is driven by supply and demand like everything else.
The price of gold under the various iterations of the gold standard was stable not because of gold's intrinsic value, but because the currency (or currencies) pegged to it had a perceived stable value. In a very real and practical sense, the strength of the U.S. dollar was backing the price of gold for much of the 20th century, and not the other way around.
Causality doesn't really apply here, because under the gold standard—before they started messing with the exchange rates and restricting redemption, and eventually banned private ownership of gold, forcing the switch to unredeemable paper currency—the price of gold and the price of the dollar were one and the same thing. A dollar was a certain amount of gold, and vice-versa. Now, the price (purchasing power) of gold may have hinged mainly on its role in the U.S. economy, but you could say something similar about any currency. The single most important criteria for any currency is marketability.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Move to Zimbabwe then.
I wish I could mod this up.
It was only the bills marked Hawaii and North Africa that cold be canceled upon invasion.
Inflation? What?
Couldn't you just follow the link four posts above and manage the gaps in your education by yourself?
Invasion. Nothing to do with inflation. There was a war on.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
There were also gold certificates issued: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate#Historic_U.S._gold_certificates_.281863.E2.80.931933.29. The United States was on the gold standard after 1900 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard#United_States--scroll down to the post-Civil War section), until 1933.
The bills you call 1976 are SERIES 1976 - that has nothing to do with the date it was printed, rather it is the date of the design.
Currency notes are printed, coins are minted.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
...Susan B. Anthony dollar too which is silver with a fluted edge, the ones that are easy to mistake for a quarter.
FYI, that's called reeding and was invented to prevent 'clipping' and counterfeiting.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The only stuff in the universe that cannot be counterfeited is energy.
Why not use angular momentum?
Personally, I'll take the gold. I prefer the feel of it in my hand and it will last, with continual fondling, for much more than 5 years.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
By that time, the metal used to mint them is likely worth more than those 1 or two dollars...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Coins have longer lifespans than bills, actually, so the cost drops.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I stand ready to trade my dirt for your gold
The value of gold versus dirt is not intrinsic, it is contextual.
If you and I were on a desert island and I have a cubic meter of arable soil to grow food with (i.e. dirt) and you have a cubic kilometer of gold, I'm gonna hold onto my dirt. Why? Because in the context of being stuck on a desert island, gold does not have much usefulness. It's too soft to make tools, too dense to make a boat or useful building material, and inedible. Dirt on the other hand can be used to grow food, something that I need more than any amount of gold.
Could you build some useful items out of gold on such an island? Probably. I'm sure it would make some very pretty planters or pipes for irrigation but those pipes would only be useful in conjunction with my dirt so again their value is contextual.
Ergo, in the (admittedly artificial) scenario I just described, dirt is more value than gold.
Encrypt the serial number into the features on both sides of the bill. That way at least the forgers have to copy multiple bills using multiple plates if they want a bunch of different serial numbers.
So how is the *government* going to print these things, without having a different set of plates for every serial number?
FYI - Bills are typicallly printed in sheets, without the serial numbers, and the serial numbers are added in a later printing step.
Really? Because I seem to remember being able to batch-print form letters, envelope addresses, etc. using different names and addresses from an (admittedly dinky and annoying to set up) database in Word in the 90's, maybe (?) I think it was called Mail Merge or something like that (obviously haven't needed to use it in quite some time...)
Seems to me that they should be able to print sequential serial numbers on the fly pretty easy, unless they are still stamp-pressing the currency notes (which it sounds like they are, as are all other world currencies...hmm)...and even if they are, what prevents them from adding an encrypted version of the serial number at the same time that they're adding the human-readable version? I'm not sure how well this would actually work, but at least it would up the ante on the quality of machines needed to produce undetectable copies...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Well, it makes a little sense. Less dense could mean a 43 pound coin.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/11/29/131665627/here-s-what-a-43-pound-coin-looks-like .http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/11/29/131665627/here-s-what-a-43-pound-coin-looks-like
On a more serious note, since gold is dense (and soft) it is harder to debase. Any base metals mixed in will result in a lighter coin. If you are good you can tell without even just by weighing it in your hand.
Quality has nothing to do with the lack of higher denominations in the US. That said, I wish there were higher denominations in the US.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Well maybe he should go see how good his paper is?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The issue is the same with backed currencies (when there were any). If *one* person claims the metal, they get paid out. If *every* person claims the metal, they don't get paid out. If it's "insurance" for a genuine crisis, it's worthless. If it's just an "investment" (the definition of "investment" being something that increases in value, then gold is not an investment - it's just holding value, while inflation affects currency), the that's something different.
Learn to love Alaska
Still, don't you suppose a fair number of gold bugs actually took delivery during this last budget meltdown?
I know this guy in Juneau that took delivery on quite a bit of silver ingots. (More than the two of us could carry in one trip).
They were an "investment" too, but he had a substantial cache cemented into his basement floor. Being something of an artist at heart, he liked to work in silver, but being a bit of a "Prepper" he liked to keep at least part of his stash at hand.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I have no idea how many people hoarded metal, rather than owning certificates for it. The "ownership" numbers don't seem to differentiate, and those that sell remote ownership don't publish how much they have or how much they've sold.
Learn to love Alaska
Gold Price Performance USD
Today -21.11 -1.59%
30 Days -79.5 -5.73%
6 Months -279.00 -17.59%
1 Year -455.80 -25.85%
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
I moved _from_ Zimbabwe many years ago, but not to the USA.
Whether you like it or not though, right now Zimbabwe has a more functional government than the USA does. It be run by a despot, against the good of its people and corrupt as all hell, but it's running. People can visit their national parks.
Not to mention one other important factor. Ease of detecting counterfeits.
Touchstones made ascertaining the quality of gold one was trying to use relatively straightforward in the old days. Cutting your gold with copper would get discovered right quick. Today, with Krugerands and 90% junk silver coins it is even simpler to detect a counterfeit. Drop a gold or silver coin from a few inches onto a table. Notice the sound? You don't get that with a copper, zinc, or steel coin. Coins made of those metals also don't have the density of gold or silver. Counterfeits made of plated lead have a "dead" sound to them and are also easy to spot.
Here is the "dense" argument in a nutshell.
I can carry enough gold in my pocket to walk into a dealership and drive out of there in a car. I can carry enough silver in my pocket to go and buy a 40" TV
Now, try to do the same thing with oil, wheat, or corn.
That is what they mean by "density". Significant purchasing power in a small volume makes it easily portable to use in transactions.
"Not to mention one other important factor. Ease of detecting counterfeits."
You are right. I failed to mention that.
"Bullion has value for many reasons."
Wrong. Bullion has a single value: make coins out of it.
You are right in that it's used for... but that's not what brings value to it: gold nuggets cover all those uses exactly the same.
What bullion brings to the table is control of market and regulation of origin, exactly what you need to control coin minting.
And about the ability of noble metals to be a store of wealth, points 3 and half four are right (do not tarnish, which means your wealth doesn't dissipate just with time, and it's highly dense, which means a little coin weights quite enough to seem worthy for quite a lot) but point one (other uses) and two (demand is high) are not, because the alternate and not directly linked to survival uses brings nothing and demand is high because of its use a wealth storage itself.
"I don't really see the "dense" argument. If it were less dense, it wouldn't take the volume of a house to represent a day's worth of effort. It would take the same volume, which would have less mass"
Exactly. And then, try to use a half a gram coin for anything. It just doesn't look proper... well, it doesn't matter *now* because we have a deep understandment that money means wealth just because we agree on that, but it has taken milennia to fully grasp that -and it isn't fully understood even now, if you look at this thread.
"I don't think understandment or cognitate are words."
Well, I'm sorry I'm not native English... I'm Spanish, so I tend to use Latin-based words if only because I'm accustomed to then. Cognitate seems not to exist but cognition and cognitive certainly do, hence my mistake.
Understandment, on the other hand, renders more than 43000 entries on google and its meaning looks, well, quite understandable, so I think its use is proper but, certainly, I'm open to suggestion on alternate words for that.
My grandma used to give me birthday money in $2 bills. I still have a little over $100 worth.